“Try it,” whispered Ender. “I’m not the frightened little boy anymore.”
“Nor are you a match for me,” said Peter. “You never were, you never will be. You have too much heart. You’re like Valentine. You flinch away from doing what has to be done. It makes you soft and weak. It makes you easy to destroy.”
A sudden flash of light. What was it, death in Outspace after all? Had Jane lost the pattern in her mind? Were they blowing up, or falling into a sun?
No. It was the door opening. It was the light of the Lusitanian morning breaking into the relative darkness of the inside of the ship.
“Are you coming out?” cried Grego. He stuck his head into the ship. “Are you—”
Then he saw them. Ender could see him silently counting.
“Nossa Senhora,” whispered Grego. “Where the hell did they come from?”
“Out of Ender’s totally screwed-up head,” said Peter.
“From old and tender memory,” said the new Valentine.
“Help me with the viruses,” said Ela.
Ender reached out for them, but it was Miro she gave them to. She didn’t explain, just looked away from him, but he understood. What had happened to him Outside was too strange for her to accept. Whatever Peter and this young new Valentine might be, they shouldn’t exist. Miro’s creation of a new body for himself made sense, even if it was terrible to watch the old corpse break into forgotten nothingness. Ela’s focus had been so pure that she created nothing outside the vials she had brought for that purpose. But Ender had dredged up two whole people, both obnoxious in their own way—the new Valentine because she was a mockery of the real one, who surely waited just outside the door. And Peter managed to be obnoxious even as he put a spin on all his taunting that was at once dangerous and suggestive.
“Jane,” whispered Ender. “Jane, are you with me?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Did you see all this?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Do you understand?”
“I’m very tired. I’ve never been tired before. I’ve never done something so very hard. It used up—all my attention at once. And two more bodies, Ender. Making me pull them into the pattern like that—I don’t know how I did it.”
“I didn’t mean to.” But she didn’t answer.
“Are you coming or what?” asked Peter. “The others are all out the door. With all those little urine-sample jars.”
“Ender, I’m afraid,” said young Valentine. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
“Neither do I,” said Ender. “God forgive me if this somehow hurts you. I never would have brought you back to hurt you.”
“I know,” she said.
“No,” said Peter. “Sweet old Ender conjures up a nubile young woman out of his own brain, who looks just like his sister in her teens. Mmm, mmm, Ender, old man, is there no limit to your depravity?”
“Only a shamefully sick mind would even think of such a thing,” Ender murmured.
Peter laughed and laughed.
Ender took young Val by the hand and led her to the door. He could feel her hand sweating and trembling in his. She felt so real. She was real. And yet there, as soon as he stood in the doorway, he could see the real Valentine, middle-aged and heading toward old, yet still the gracious, beautiful woman he had known and loved for all these years. That’s the true sister, the one I love as my second self. What was this young girl doing in my mind?
It was clear that Grego and Ela had said enough that people knew something strange had happened. And when Miro had strode from the ship, hale and vigorous, clear of speech and so exuberant he looked ready to burst into song—that had brought on a buzz of excitement. A miracle. There were miracles out there, wherever the starship went.
Ender’s appearance, though, brought a hush. Few would have known, at a glance, that the young girl with him was Valentine in her youth—no one there but Valentine herself had known her then. And no one but Valentine was likely to recognize Peter Wiggin in his vigorous young manhood; the pictures in the history texts were usually of the holos taken late in his life, when cheap, permanent holography was first coming into its own.
But Valentine knew. Ender stood before the door, young Val beside him, Peter emerging just behind, and Valentine knew them both. She stepped forward, away from Jakt, until she stood before Ender face to face.
“Ender,” she said. “Dear sweet tormented boy, was this what you create, when you go to a place where you can make anything you want?” She reached out her hand and touched the young copy of herself upon the cheek. “So beautiful,” she said. “I was never this beautiful, Ender. She’s perfect. She’s all I wanted to be but never was.”
“Aren’t you glad to see me, Val, my dearest sweetheart Demosthenes?” Peter pushed his way between Ender and young Val. “Don’t you have tender memories of me, as well? Am I not more beautiful than you remembered? I’m certainly glad to see you. You’ve done so well with the persona I created for you. Demosthenes. I made you, and you don’t even thank me for it.”
“Thank you, Peter,” whispered Valentine. She looked again at young Val. “What will you do with them?”
“Do with us?” said Peter. “We’re not his to do anything with. He may have brought me back, but I’m my own man now, as I always was.”
Valentine turned back to the crowd, still awestruck at the strangeness of events. After all, they had seen three people board the ship, had seen it disappear, then reappear on the exact spot no more than seven minutes later—and instead of three people emerging, there were five, two of them strangers. Of course they had stayed to gawk.
But there’d be no answers for anyone today. Except on the most important question of all. “Has Ela taken the vials to the lab?” she asked. “Let’s break it up here, and go see what Ela’s made for us in outspace.”
17
ENDER’S CHILDREN
It was the last day of the test of the recolada. Word of its success—so far—had already spread through the human colony—and, Ender assumed, among all the pequeninos as well. Ela’s assistant named Glass had volunteered to be the experimental subject. He had lived now for three days in the same isolation chamber where Planter had sacrificed himself. This time, though, the descolada had been killed within him by the viricide bacterium he had helped Ela devise. And this time, performing the functions that the descolada had once fulfilled, was Ela’s new recolada virus. It had worked perfectly. He was not even slightly ill. Only one last step remained before the recolada could be pronounced a full success.
An hour before that final test, Ender, with his absurd entourage of Peter and young Val, was meeting with Quara and Grego in Grego’s cell.
“The pequeninos have accepted it,” Ender explained to Quara. “They�
�re willing to take the risk of killing the descolada and replacing it with the recolada, after testing it with Glass alone.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Quara.
“I am,” said Peter. “The piggies obviously have a deathwish as a species.”
Ender sighed. Though he was no longer a frightened little boy, and Peter was no longer older and larger and stronger than he, there was still no love in Ender’s heart for this simulacrum of his brother that he had somehow created Outside. He was everything Ender had feared and hated in his childhood, and it was infuriating and frightening to have him back again.
“What do you mean?” said Grego. “If the pequeninos didn’t consent to it, then the descolada would make them too dangerous for humankind to allow them to survive.”
“Of course,” said Peter, smiling. “The physicist is an expert on strategy.”
“What Peter is saying,” said Ender, “is that if he were in charge of the pequeninos—which he no doubt would like to be—he would never willingly give up the descolada until he had won something from humanity in exchange for it.”
“To the surprise of all, the aging boy wonder still has a tiny spark of wit,” said Peter. “Why should they kill off their only weapon that humanity has any reason to fear? The Lusitania Fleet is still coming, and it still has the M.D. Device aboard. Why don’t they make Andrew here get on that magic flying football of his and go meet the fleet and lay down the law?”
“Because they’d shoot me down like a dog,” said Ender. “The pequeninos are doing this because it’s right and fair and decent. Words that I’ll define for you later.”
“I know the words,” said Peter. “I also know what they mean.”
“You do?” asked young Val. Her voice, as always, was a surprise—soft, mild, and yet able to pierce the conversation. Ender remembered that Valentine’s voice had always been that way. Impossible not to listen to, though she so rarely raised her voice.
“Right. Fair. Decent,” said Peter. The words sounded filthy in his mouth. “Either the person saying them believes in those concepts or not. If not, then those words mean that he’s got somebody standing behind me with a knife in his hand. And if he does believe them, then those words mean that I’m going to win.”
“I’ll tell you what they mean,” said Quara. “They mean that we’re going to congratulate the pequeninos—and ourselves—for wiping out a sentient species that may exist nowhere else in the universe.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” said Peter.
“Everybody’s so sure that the descolada is a designed virus,” said Quara, “but nobody’s considered the alternative—that a much more primitive, vulnerable version of the descolada evolved naturally, and then changed itself to its present form. It might be a designed virus, yes, but who did the designing? And now we’re killing it without attempting conversation.”
Peter grinned at her, then at Ender. “I’m surprised that this weaselly little conscience is not your blood offspring,” he said. “She’s as obsessed with finding reasons to feel guilty as you and Val.”
Ender ignored him and attempted to answer Quara. “We are killing it. Because we can’t wait any longer. The descolada is trying to destroy us, and there’s no time to dither. If we could, we would.”
“I understand all that,” said Quara. “I cooperated, didn’t I? It just makes me sick to hear you talking as if the pequeninos were somehow brave about collaborating in an act of xenocide in order to save their own skin.”
“Us or them, kid,” said Peter. “Us or them.”
“You can’t possibly understand,” said Ender, “how ashamed I am to hear my own arguments on his lips.”
Peter laughed. “Andrew pretends not to like me,” he said. “But the kid’s a fraud. He admires me. He worships me. He always has. Just like his pretty little angel here.”
Peter poked at young Val. She didn’t shy away. She acted instead as if she hadn’t even felt his finger in the flesh of her upper arm.
“He worships us both. In his twisted little mind, she’s the moral perfection that he can never achieve. And I am the power and genius that was always just out of poor little Andrew’s reach. It was really quite modest of him, don’t you think? For all these years, he’s carried his betters with him inside his mind.”
Young Val reached out and took Quara’s hand. “It’s the worst thing you’ll ever do in your life,” she said, “helping the people you love to do something that in your heart you believe is deeply wrong.”
Quara wept.
But it was not Quara that worried Ender. He knew that she was strong enough to hold the moral contradictions of her own actions, and still remain sane. Her ambivalence toward her own actions would probably mellow her, make her less certain from moment to moment that her judgment was absolutely correct, and that all who disagreed with her were absolutely wrong. If anything, at the end of this she would emerge more whole and compassionate and, yes, decent than she had been before in her hotheaded youth. And perhaps young Val’s gentle touch—along with her words naming exactly the pain that Quara was feeling—would help her to heal all the sooner.
What worried Ender was the way Grego was looking at Peter with such admiration. Of all people, Grego should have learned what Peter’s words could lead to. Yet here he was, worshiping Ender’s walking nightmare. I have to get Peter out of here, thought Ender, or he’ll have even more disciples on Lusitania than Grego had—and he’ll use them far more effectively and, in the long run, the effect will be more deadly.
Ender had little hope that Peter would turn out to be like the real Peter, who grew to be a strong and worthy hegemon. This Peter, after all, was not a fully fleshed-out human being, full of ambiguity and surprise. Rather he had been created out of the caricature of attractive evil that lingered in the deepest recesses of Ender’s unconscious mind. There would be no surprises here. Even as they prepared to save Lusitania from the descolada, Ender had brought a new danger to them, potentially just as destructive.
But not as hard to kill.
Again he stifled the thought, though it had come up a dozen times since he first realized that it was Peter sitting at his left hand in the starship. I created him. He isn’t real, just my nightmare. If I kill him, it wouldn’t be murder, would it? It would be the moral equivalent of—what? Waking up? I have imposed my nightmare on the world, and if I killed him the world would just be waking up to find the nightmare gone, nothing more.
If it had been Peter alone, Ender might have talked himself into such a murder, or at least he thought he might. But it was young Val who stopped him. Fragile, beautiful of soul—if Peter could be killed, so could she. If he should be killed, then perhaps she ought to be as well—she had as little right to exist; she was as unnatural, as narrow and distorted in her creation. But he could never do that. She must be protected, not harmed. And if the one was real enough to remain alive, so must the other be. If harming young Val would be murder, so would harming Peter. They were spawned in the same creation.
My children, thought Ender bitterly. My darling little offspring, who leaped fully-formed from my head like Athena from the mind of Zeus. Only what I have here isn’t Athena. More like Diana and Hades. The virgin huntress and the master of hell.
“We’d better go,” said Peter. “Before Andrew talks himself into killing me.”
Ender smiled wanly. That was the worst thing—that Peter and young Val seemed to have come into existence knowing more about his own mind than he knew himself. In time, he hoped, that intimate knowledge of him would fade. But in the meantime, it added to the humiliation, the way that Peter taunted him about thoughts that no one else would have guessed. And young Val—he knew from the way she looked at him sometimes that she also knew. He had no secrets anymore.
“I’ll go home with you,” Val said to Quara.
“No,” Quara answered. “I’ve done what I’ve done. I’ll be there to see Glass through to the end of his test.”
“We wouldn’t
want to miss our chance to suffer openly,” said Peter.
“Shut up, Peter,” said Ender.
Peter grinned. “Oh, come on. You know that Quara’s just milking this for all it’s worth. It’s just her way of making herself the star of the show—everybody being careful and tender with her when they should be cheering for what Ela accomplished. Scene-stealing is so low, Quara—right up your alley.”
Quara might have answered, if Peter’s words had not been so outrageous and if they had not contained a germ of truth that confused her. Instead it was young Val who fixed Peter with a cold glare and said, “Shut up, Peter.”
The same words Ender had said, only when young Val said them, they worked. He grinned at her, and winked—a conspiratorial wink, as if to say, I’ll let you play your little game, Val, but don’t think I don’t know that you’re sucking up to everybody by being so sweet. But he said no more as they left Grego in his cell.
Mayor Kovano joined them outside. “A great day in the history of humanity,” he said. “And by sheerest accident, I get to be in all the pictures.” The others laughed—especially Peter, who had struck up a quick and easy friendship with Kovano.
“It’s no accident,” said Peter. “A lot of people in your position would have panicked and wrecked everything. It took an open mind and a lot of courage to let things move the way they have.”
Ender almost laughed aloud at Peter’s obvious flattery. But flattery is never so obvious to the recipient. Oh, Kovano punched Peter in the arm and denied everything, but Ender could see that he loved hearing it, and that Peter had already earned more real influence with Kovano than Ender had. Don’t these people see how Peter is cynically winning them all over?
The only one who saw Peter with anything like Ender’s fear and loathing was the Bishop—but in his case it was theological prejudice, not wisdom, that kept him from being sucked in. Within hours of their return from Outside, the Bishop had called upon Miro, urging him to accept baptism. “God has performed a great miracle in your healing,” he said, “but the way in which it was done—trading one body for another, instead of directly healing the old one—leaves us in the dangerous position that your spirit inhabits a body that has never been baptized. And since baptism is performed on the flesh, I fear that you may be unsanctified.” Miro wasn’t very interested in the Bishop’s ideas about miracles—he didn’t see God as having much to do with his healing—but the sheer restoration of his strength and his speech and his freedom made him so ebullient that he probably would have agreed to anything. The baptism would take place early next week, at the first services to be held in the new chapel.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 127
